[18+ Steampunk Cozy Fantasy BDSM Romance]
When Halian, Ilnara's best engineer, loses his arm in a gruesome accident saving his best friend, his life takes a turn for the worse. Although years have passed and he's been fitted with a mechanical arm, l...
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Halian cursed under his breath as his prosthetic arm once again got stuck, the gears and pistons making it up refusing to obey his will.
He needed to finish these sketches, and then transform them into proper schematics. The deadline for the new and improved digging machine was drawing nigh. But his arm kept malfunctioning.
Erina had cleaned all the gears and brass plating many times over, fix up all the components she could, but they both knew it wasn't the actual source of the problem. The battery was simply dying after years of use, and it needed to be replaced.
The problem was that they didn't have the pearls to replace it.
And if Halian couldn't work more efficiently, he might lose his junior engineering position. As if it wasn't humiliating enough before.
Halian had been the best of the best prior to his ignoble fall. And now he might fall further, simply because he couldn't keep up with the workload disabled like this. It wasn't fair.
Of course, if he could go back, he'd always choose protecting Erina over keeping his forearm. He'd rather she lived, every time. But it frustrated him to tears sometimes.
Especially because if he lost his job, Erina would get assigned to be the mechanic of another engineer. They'd drift apart, and the thought broke Halian's heart.
She was his best friend. And she was so much more. She was...well, she was his everything.
If only he wasn't such a coward and actually managed to tell her that at some point. But every time he'd tried, he'd lost his nerve.
Besides, Erina was too wonderful to settle for Halian. Especially now that his hand was barely functioning. It had taken him so long to learn to use it, and once he'd finally managed to, it had become old and cumbersome.
Without a new battery, it would stop functioning altogether eventually. And since he would lose his job then, he'd never scrape together enough pearls to fix it. He couldn't even do that now.
It was simply an impossible situation to deal with.
"Hey!"
Halian flinched in surprise when he was suddenly hugged from behind tightly, pressing him into his swivel chair. He chuckled a bit, unable to help it. Erina was simply too endearing.
He patted her arm since he couldn't exactly hug back like this, then turned his chair around as soon as she let go.
He wanted to get up to hug her back now that he could, but he found himself just sitting there, awestruck at how beautiful she was.
Her black, wavy hair was tied back into a bun, but it refused to be tamed, sticking out at all angles, especially around the goggles pushed up onto her forehead, a few strands falling into her eyes regardless.
